What initially should have been a purely private matter has turned into a public scandal that could cost the career of one of the most powerful men in German politics, Jens Spahn, who until this Saturday was the chairman of the conservative CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the German Bundestag. Spahn and his husband Daniel Funke announced last Wednesday that they had become parents to baby Georg. In statements to the tabloid Bild, they confirmed that they had resorted to a surrogate mother in the United States for this.
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Surrogacy, however, is strictly prohibited in Germany, so the news immediately generated reactions of annoyance and outrage outside, but especially within the Union’s own ranks, and several political actors called for his resignation, accusing him of double standards, damaging his party’s credibility, and abusing his privileges to act against German law.
This Saturday, Spahn announced his resignation in a letter addressed to the Union parliamentary group, in which he acknowledged that his personal happiness is not compatible with his position: “The dilemma between my personal decision to have a child through surrogacy and the understandable expectations placed on me as chairman of our parliamentary group has become greater than I expected,” he explains in the letter reported by German media.
According to the letter, the controversy has made him realize that his family is the most important thing to him: “In recent days I have become aware that my personal happiness of creating a family together with my husband is not compatible with my political office,” he wrote.
And although initially the Federal Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, from the same party as Spahn, congratulated the couple on the event of which he was privately informed, as the outrage grew, he distanced himself from the case. German media, in fact, claim that the resignation responds to a request from the party leader.
On Friday in the city of Brühl, Merz had stated that the legal situation regarding surrogacy in Germany is clear and that he saw no reason to amend the law. He also said that on Monday morning he would hold a meeting with the party leadership where Spahn was expected to give explanations and decisions about his political future would be made. But the pressure did not allow him to get past the weekend and this Saturday he announced his decision to leave the position.
The CDU reaffirmed last February through a party congress resolution that “surrogacy remains prohibited without restrictions, regardless of the motivation.”
The conservatives’ argument is to prevent abuse, exploitation, and health risks that the practice can generate in the bodies of the women who agree to it. They are also not in favor in cases where it is done for altruistic reasons, when a woman wants to help a friend couple without asking for money in return.
The anger within the conservative party is enormous because when the resolution was reaffirmed, the surrogate mother of Spahn’s baby was already pregnant and he kept this secret.
On Friday, Spahn himself spoke about the case on a Bild podcast, the same tabloid that revealed his fatherhood. In an interview with journalist Paul Ronzheimer, he said that he and his husband had debated for a long time how to make their common desire to have children come true. He himself had been divided for a long time. As a Christian, he said, he knew that “on one hand there is pure doctrine and, on the other, real life. And that sometimes things are not black or white and there are no easy decisions.”
In the podcast, the conservative politician said he regretted not having faced the debate that now hits his political career earlier, but assured that when the CDU approved the resolution on surrogacy at the party congress, he was not yet ready to address it.
In Germany, family law also has its contradictions and gaps that allow cases like Spahn’s not to be unique. Although surrogacy is prohibited, when a couple presents themselves in Germany with a baby born through that practice abroad, they are legally recognized as the parents of that child as long as one of the parties demonstrates a genetic link.
In the case occupying all the headlines of the German press these days, this applies without problems because, according to what the parties also told Bild, the biological father of Spahn’s baby is his husband, Daniel Funke. They even said that both had decided that the woman who carried the pregnancy would have an active and permanent role in the child’s life.
Jens Spahn is one of the most controversial German politicians with a series of scandals behind him that can now catch up with him. The most striking: the million-dollar purchase of masks during the pandemic, when he served as Federal Minister of Health, from a company where his husband worked as director of the Berlin office. Or the purchase of a million-dollar mansion in the midst of the coronavirus crisis with the help of a bank loan from an institution where he had been a member of the board of directors.